Holocaust Survivor's Story Will Live On In Museum Archives Museum Will Protect Stories Like Hers

April 18, 1993|by PETE LEFFLER, The Morning Call

Sara Rosjanski was 28 when she vanished into the darkness of Poland's Volcha-Nora Forest, clutching her first-born, 1-year-old Samuel.

She emerged two years later, long after burying the boy in the musty earth.

With her came husband Jacob Rosjanski, who at 34 already was wracked by exposure to typhus, starvation and the elements that would leave him debilitated the rest of his life.

Also with her was a brother, Aron Zuchowicki, a blacksmith remembered among the partisans surviving in the woods for repeatedly bluffing his way out of jams with German soldiers by brandishing a rifle that did not work.

Perhaps 1,000 Jews fled to the forest when Nazi Germany decided midway through 1942 that their labor no longer was needed. Two years later 70 came back out, according to Sara's son, Dr. Abe Ross, of South Whitehall.

This week their stories and the plight of millions of other Jews will be formally memorialized with the dedication of a Holocaust museum in downtown Washington.

Roughly 10,000 people -- and dozens from the Lehigh Valley -- are expected to hear President Clinton on Thursday dedicate the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which was built between the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial.

Abe Ross (the family Americanized its name after the war) will be among them. The woman now called Sara Ross, a Cincinnati resident who will celebrate her 80th birthday next month, will wait until a less crowded day.

"It's nice that they are doing something," Sara Ross said. But "I not want to any more talk about anything in the world. I want peace and quiet."

Congress mandated a Holocaust memorial council in 1980 and charged it with creating a "living memorial" to the 6 million Jews and other victims of Nazi fanaticism during World War II, ranging from the handicapped to Russian prisoners of war.

The result is a building with five separate sections, the largest a 36,000-square-foot exhibition that tells the story of "Jews targeted for annihilation in systematic, state-sponsored genocide."

The Learning Center, a separate area, offers visitors a chance to explore the Holocaust for themselves via touch-screen computers. The Hall of Remembrance is designed for quiet contemplation or formal ceremonies.

The Children's Wall, part of the museum's education center, will feature thousands of tiles hand painted by American schoolchildren. It will commemorate the 1.5 million children who died in the Holocaust.

Finally, the Holocaust Research Institute will include a library and archive. The museum's $168 million price tag was covered with private contributions, the memorial council says.

Ross sees the museum stamping the Holocaust on America's conscience.

"Too many people close their ears," he said. "When you have a museum as part of the nation's capital, it'll never go away."

A poll scheduled for release tomorrow plumbs the depths of American ignorance about an event that dwarfs the present-day atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Four in 10 adults and half of high school students could not correctly answer this question: `As far as you know, what does the term Holocaust refer to?' according to the American Jewish Committee, which commissioned the Roper poll.

One third of adults and slightly more students surveyed said it "seems possible ... that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened," the poll showed.

A student of his parents' own travails, Ross fused the need for more understanding of what happened with a desire to do something on his parents' behalf.

He donated money that allowed the museum to purchase Russian and German documents from an archive near his mother's hometown of Ivatsevichi, now in Belarus. The material will be available to Holocaust researchers in his mother's name.

"It was my small way of doing something for the museum and also for my mother," said Ross, 47, an anesthesiologist. "Hopefully my children and grandchildren one day will say: `This is us, we're a part of history.'"

Sara Rosjanski was born in Kosow, Poland, in 1913. She married Jacob, from nearby Zelva, 25 years later. They settled in Ivatsevichi, a pastoral rail stop on the Russian border.

Jacob was a cap maker in the town of 10,000. Sara ran a general store. Her father was a well-known blacksmith.

Life followed simple rhythms, difficult by modern American standards, even after the Russians occupied the area in 1939 at the start of Word War II. Germans shattered the tranquility in June 1941, Sara said.

Though many were survivors of World War I, area residents were unprepared for the Nazi horror. Within weeks Jews, wearing yellow stars, were herded into a ghetto. The strongest were used to build a road for German armies heading east.

Young, single Jews found early refuge in the forest, Sara said. His parents felt the baby denied them that option. Ghetto conditions were primitive. Food was meager. They adjusted.